Ah! Already planning on that Second Edition of Grow With the Flow!

When the book described IntelligenceRiver.net, the web site to support the community of Grow With the Flow readers, I said one of the buildings in RiverTown, along with the Coffee Shop (our forum) and the RiverTown News (this blog), was an Outfitters. It was to be a list of annotated links to quality sources for supplies and equipment, organizations that support parents, and web sites of all sorts with helpful information.

Paul pointed out today that it might make more sense to simply describe those quality links here in RiverTown News. “Agreed,” I said, “but then people won’t be able to sort those posts out, if all they want is that list of resources.” With the genuine forebearance that makes him a gifted teacher, he pointed out that if I simply made a new category within this blog, all readers would need to do is click that category and they’d have a list of all the links.

It’s at this point that I usually go into my Homer Simpson routine….

Anyhow, here it is, a new category called “Outfitters,” where we’ll list resources we think may be able to help you and your children on your journey along the Intelligence River.

I just talked with Paul about a slight problem: Grow With the Flow is ready to go, IntelligenceRiver.net isn’t. (He’s up to his neck in a project for Minnesota Public Radio.) We decided that for the moment he’ll hold off on the part of the web site that will sell the book. In its place, he’ll post contact information for The Erie Book Store. People will still be able to buy the book by toll-free calls, fax, or email – it’s only online ordering that won’t yet be possible. The advantage is, we can get the web site up and running: post the first chapter of the book, open the doors of the Coffee Shop, and get posts to RiverTown News (like this one) online.

Faced with a sufficiently remarkable time warp, even the best planned countdown can go awry. Consider these two events:

Grow With the Flow is to be printed tomorrow, June 15.

The printed copies arrived today, June 14.

Another long conversation with my sister, Kathleen Cantrell, and nephew, David Cadena, at The Erie Book Store, and we’re confident we have distribution plans ready to go when the books arrive.

The mantra of Grow With the Flow is “Your mind is a playground.” I argue in the first pages of the book that this is hard-headed, scientifically solid advice – that it’s the route to effective learning and real-world accomplishment.

Daniel Pink, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece on June 4, says “do what you love” is the way to go for this year’s graduates:

Commencement speakers have long offered graduating seniors the same warm and gooey career advice: Do what you love.

And graduates have long responded the same way: They’ve listened carefully, nodded earnestly, and gone out and become accountants ….

But this year is different. The students graduating this spring will operate in a labor market that increasingly confers an economic advantage on the activities that people do out of a sense of intrinsic satisfaction – designing cool things, telling stories and helping others. For the class of 2005, “Do what you love” is no longer a soft-hearted sentiment. It is also a hard-headed strategy.

Mr Pink points to three forces – automation, outsourcing, and prosperity – which will require higher-level skills of our kids. Listing qualities we’ll have to rely on, he includes one of my magic words, “joyfulness.”

In other words, to make it in the emerging economy, we will have to do things that software can’t do faster and that overseas knowledge workers can’t do more cheaply. In addition, what we produce must also satisfy the growing consumer demand for products and services infused with emotion, spirituality and artistry ….

As the information age matures, eat-your-spinach skills are still necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. The abilities that matter more are turning out to be the abilities that are also fundamental sources of human gratification. And that’s good news for many intrinsically motivated (but sometimes parentally discouraged) professions. Indeed, more Americans already work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors.

To be sure, this new labor market is not a land in which every person will be able to pursue a passion and instantly arrive at a fat paycheck. Still, we may finally be at the point where we can tell freshly minted graduates: Look, it’s a rough world out there. There’s only one way to survive. Do what you love.

So many books to read, but his is on my list: Daniel H. Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

It looks like we’re getting close on IntelligenceRiver.net, the web site that will support the community of Grow With the Flow readers, and be the main way we market the book.

Paul Cantrell – my elder son – has been, in his fine phrase, “gainfully unemployed” for the good part of a year. He had enough money saved up to take a year to compose and perform music, and see to some computer projects. (Check out his music blog and podcast)

He’s also been writing a blog, “Comparing Notes,” for MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) about the music scene in the Twin Cities. He used to work for MPR, and is going to be back with them for a short-term project, working on their pledge drive software, starting next Monday.

The point of all that? He’s piling into IntelligenceRiver.net this week, hoping to have it pretty well ready to go before he switches to the MPR project.

And then, of course, the book is going to be coming off the presses June 15, so I’m feeling maybe just the slightest sense of urgency to have it ready…

The “blue line” proof of Grow With the Flow should be arriving at United Graphics, in Matoon, Illinois, within the next 99 minutes, if UPS Overnight Air is to be trusted. That means the book should be loading onto delivery trucks by mid-month.